wickedqueen.net

And not the good kind, either, where someone gets caught being wanton in the conservatory and has to get married by special license.*

I got an email a few days ago from Rikhei asking if I’d heard about the possibility that Cassie Edwards was a plagiarist. At first I thought she was talking about well-known fanfic rip-off artist Cassandra Claire, which was confusing since that happened a long time ago, although I am STILL kind of appalled that someone would rip off Zelazny’s Amber for HP slash.** (This reminds me, I keep meaning to write a post about Zelazny and Amber. Later.)

Anyway, then I clicked the link to Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy Books, which I have actually read in the past and I don’t know why I stopped keeping up with it, and realized that no, she was talking about Cassie EDWARDS, well-known horrifying American Indian culture appropriater, unparalleled in her use of the Noble Savage Standing in for Sensitive New Age Guys Who Would Actually Be Too Anachronistic To Stand, Even for Zebra.*** Indian romances are pretty common–generally featuring an Indian or mixed race hero and a feisty white heroine. I actually did a project on constructions of American Indian masculinity in these books for a sociology of gender course I took as an undergrad,**** in which I concluded basically that they were stand-ins for Sensitive New Age Guys Who… you get the picture.

Well, apparently, the Smart Bitches tried plugging some of her more wooden and weirdly out-of-place passages into Google, and they discovered that the reason they were out of place is that they were TOTALLY FREAKING PLAGIARIZED. In at least one case from a 1928 ethnography, which I take special note of as a social scientist. Perhaps someday chunks of my dissertation will appear, uncredited, in a lusty tale of Facebook intrigue.

I thought this was sort of half entertaining, half infuriating, given how pissed off I get about plagiarism in general–I was, after all, raised by academics–and then I was browsing my usual infotainment sources today and discovered that the story had broken in the popular press: Nora Roberts says peer lifted material

(In case you are not particularly romance-aware, Nora Roberts is a Big Deal.)

The AP article actually pulls its best punch by using one of the less egregious passages from Edwards’s work; you should definitely review the SB series to see some really incredibly obvious theft. Confronted with it, Edwards response was not particularly surprising:

Edwards, interviewed earlier this week by the AP, acknowledged that she sometimes “takes” her material “from reference books,” but added that she didn’t know she was supposed to credit her sources.

“When you write historical romances, you’re not asked to do that,” Edwards said, speaking from her home in Mattoon, Ill. She then asked her husband to get on the phone. He told the AP that his wife simply gets “ideas” from reference books.

“She doesn’t lift passages,” Charles Edwards said, adding that “you would have to draw your own conclusions” on how closely his wife’s work resembles other sources.

Although the part where she put her husband on the phone to handle it was kind of shocking. I realize that the woman is like 70, but one assumes that she’s handled the majority of her business contacts, etc., at least in communication with an agent. And really, what more is there to say after “she didn’t know she was supposed to credit her sources”? It’s like she’s an undergraduate or something! A plagiarizing culture-appropriating bosom-heaving undergraduate. I am totally putting some of the examples from SB on my next “What is plagiarism and how terrible will the vengeance of my TA be if I commit it” hand-out.

In fact, the AP article actually quotes the developer of TurnItIn, UW’s preferred plagiarism detection software: “Ms. Edwards’ unattributed use of other peoples’ work as her own definitely constitutes plagiarism.”

I wonder if she’ll be stripped of her RWA (Romance Writers of America) lifetime achievement award.

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*Ask me about the peerage some time. I should also note that I use the term “bodice ripper” with love. Before 11-year-olds could find porn on the internet, there were other people’s mothers’ stashes of romance novels.

****It was the only sociology course I took as an undergrad, actually. And now I have a masters degree!

You know, all those years of secondary school gym class, I thought I hated physical activity, but it turns out I just hated fascism.*

I remember all those thousands of hours
that I spent in grade school watching the clock,
waiting for recess or lunch or to go home.
Waiting: for anything but school.
My teachers could easily have ridden with Jesse James
for all the time they stole from me.

–Richard Brautigan, The Memoirs of Jesse James

(My other reflection on biking lately is that the older I get, the more like my father I seem to become. Biking, cooking,** and I’ve started contemplating camping, which was definitely not my thing as a child, at least not after age 8 or so.)

My hair is also getting really faded. I’m loathe to cover the highlights, which still look good (if faded), but probably I’ll dye it all back to Atomic Pink after I get back from visiting my cousin in LA. This does mean that Cyn and I will not be total twinsies if we get together for lunch, but that may well save the universe from implosion,*** so perhaps I should consider it a necessary sacrifice.

And speaking of the universe imploding, today’s Thursday PARC Forum is about dark matter. Maybe I should go.

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*I’ve remarked this to several people now, which is why I can’t remember who thought it should be on a t-shirt. I think it might be a little long.

***I’ve always been a big fan of parallel universes, such as Star Trek Dark Mirror and the Futurama Cowboy Universe. Maybe there’s one where everyone’s got pink hair EXCEPT Cyn and me. I’ll tell you one thing: I bet Evil Bizarro Cabell has really conservative hair. Lime green would be the photo-negative, but I’ve done that, too.

I spent yesterday in wine country with friends from Stanford; it was fun. Mostly what we did was taste wine, and I suppose I could have gotten Thrilling Action Shots of that, but I was kind of busy drinking tasting. And getting surprisingly blotto surprisingly fast from what seemed like very small quantities of wine, although I guess we did share a bottle at lunch, but come on, there were FOUR OF US. My friend Anne suggests it was the altitude, which sounds like a good excuse.

Anyway, the wineries were cool. Brandy was collecting ceramic coasters from them, and I did a little Christmas shopping. There were also some totally bizarre random aspects to the buildings and grounds, Exhibit A being the Giant Thumb at Clos Pegase:

No, we don’t know, either. Awesome thumb, though.

Clos Pegase was my favorite of the wineries that we visited, although in the interest of full disclosure, it was also the last. Their emblem was Pegasus, which was cool and reminded me of my childhood, when my parents and I would have long and no doubt frustrating discussions in which they would attempt to explain to me that “Pegasus” was the name of a SPECIFIC WINGED HORSE, rather than a categorical reference for all horses with wings, and I would steadfastly ignore them. I was a strong-willed child.*

Today I walked to Mountain View intending to visit Target and Trader Joe’s, but got sidetracked checking in at the Happy Salon, which I am always passing by and wondering if they do walk-ins, which they didn’t exactly, but they said I could come back in an hour, and I REALLY needed an eyebrow wax.

So instead of walking the rest of the way to Trader Joe’s for milk and produce,** I elected to browse the Tower Records going-out-of-business sale across the street. I was checking the science fiction paperbacks for S.M. Stirling*** when a nerdy middle-aged man wearing a baseball cap inexpertedly fabric puffy painted “45!” came up to me.

“Ah, hi,” he said.
“Hello…” I said.
“I’m on a scavenger hunt for my friend’s birthday–he’s 45–pointing at hat–we just started, and we have to find someone with at least two piercings not in their ears, and, um–I was wondering if by chance–”

I stuck my tongue out at him. He was overjoyed.

“Can I take your picture?”

I permitted it. He thanked me effusively and darted off. Twenty minutes later the woman who waxed my eyebrows at the Happy Salon was grilling me on what I use on my hair, and how often, and how do I get that color? I only wished that Kristen, who once doubted my accounts of the attention my hair draws in public, could have been there to see it all. (I realize that Scavenger Hunt Guy didn’t ACTUALLY say anything about my HAIR, but let’s consider why he was so sure that I’d have a second non-ear piercing.)

At least one wine taster guy remarked on my hair at GREAT length. Then he carded me. It’s not exactly MATURE hair, I’ll grant you.

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*My sister gets those at the children’s museum a lot.

***If you like the post-apocalypse–or as my father puts it, if you are big on revenge fantasies–you will dig S.M. Stirling.

Yesterday CNN ran an obit for Tetsuro Tamba. The headline was “‘You Only Live Twice’ actor dead,” which makes sense given that their audience is likely to be most familiar with the 1967 James Bond movie, but I was surprised to discover near the end of the piece that he had also starred in the 1973 film adaptation of Japan Sinks.

As a connoisseur of the post-apocalypse, I read Japan Sinks in translation in college (I had to get it on interlibrary loan). The basic premise of the novel is that Japan is going to be completely dragged under the ocean by tectonic activity; while there is some earth science fiction going on there, the real story is a speculative fiction description of the frantic attempts of the government to secure a future for Japanese culture. While other governments are happy to take custody of art treasures, they are less enthusiastic about refugees. The influence of the immediate post-WWII/atomic bomb era is obvious in the general sense of the rest of the world’s indifference/hostility to Japan;* the story does not really close on an optimistic note.

It’s not EXACTLY the (post)apocalypse, unless you consider Japan to be the entire world, but then again, this was not then and is not now an unimaginable attitude among the citizenry. Consider The Day After Tomorrow, as well, which was basically the story of a North American apocalypse with similar social issues, although less drawn out. (And really was just a USA POST-apocalypse, since I assume the entire population of Canada was just supposed to be dead.)

Interestingly, when I searched the IMDB for information about the movie, I also uncovered this year’s remake–of which I had been aware although I hadn’t realized it had been released yet–and I discovered that while the 1973 version was titled Nippon Chinbotsu, the 2006 remake is Nihon Chinbotsu.

The implications of this shift are unclear. In the present day, the use of the pronunciation “Nippon” makes you sound a little right wing. I don’t know if there were similar implications in 1973. I also don’t know how you would indicate this difference if you were writing in Japanese, which uses a two kanji character compound for “Japan” and as far as I know it’s the same regardless of your political leanings. I tried and failed to find an indication of how the book was originally titled/pronounced.

In fact, I think “Nippon” is probably more appropriate to the tone of the story, which as I recall had a fairly strong “wareware Nihonjin” (”We Japanese”) kind of feel to it, what with the tragedy of diaspora and all.*** The user review I saw on the IMDB remake page complained that it had largely ignored the sociological story in favor of big budget disaster effects–so closer to The Day After Tomorrow, although I assume without the dire wolves loose in the big city. It would be interesting to see the 1973 and 2006 versions together, although I don’t know when the latter will be available in English.

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*Although as I recall, this focused mostly on the white Western world and less on the rest of Asia, which has more immediate and arguably justified reasons to be hostile toward Japan.

**Do not discount the possibility that I am talking out my ass here.

Recently I have been reading S.M. Stirling’s post-apocalyptic science fiction tomes, Dies the Fire and The Protector’s War. My father recommended them to me, knowing well how much I love the post-apocalyse, in all its many and varied forms:

1. Nuclear war
2. Meteor strike
3. Zombies
4. Plague (this is usually my favorite)
5. Slow inexorable human destruction of the environment (cf. Tank Girl)
6. Alien invasion (this can be followed by either enslavement or diaspora; the latter case, as in Titan AE, is probably my second favorite)
7. Abrupt replacement of science with magic
8. Miscellaneous

Stirling’s books seem to fall into this last category, although they combine elements of several–thus far, there has been some cataclysmic event that has caused the basic chemical reactions behind combustion (guns, engines, also electricity, including, like, digital watches) to stop working, but no one knows how or why. Aliens have been speculated about but have not actually appeared. Apparently there is a companion trilogy, already written, in which a chunk of Nantucket disappears and reappears in the 17th century or something, but given that combustion has stopped functioning as we know it in these books, it doesn’t seem like it would be a straightforward case of geographic time wormhole. And while the story does have a strong mythic flavor to it, which I like, no one is casting magic missile or anything.

I don’t really know why I love the post-apocalypse so much, especially given my extremely focused love for the internet* and my deep appreciation for impractical attire that sparkles, but I’ve always had a special place in my heart for it. I suppose as a child I did have some pastoral fantasies, in a gothic kind of way. I wanted to be Robin Hood, or possibly a widely feared forest-dwelling witch.

The latter is probably the best position for my post-apocalyptic skill set, except for the part where I know nothing about herbs–well, except for a bunch of things that are poisonous, which might interest some. I can also read Tarot and act pretty freaky, and I have strong cat lady tendencies.

It might also be good to remove the temptation of human contact, since one thing that would be a really terrible idea for Post-Apocalyptic Me would be pregnancy. Not only do I have a genetic factor that makes it more likely that I would have a blood clot, for which pregnancy is a precipitating factor,** but I have my mother’s non-existent hips. She was in labor with me for like 36 hours before the C-section, an option I imagine would be fantastically dangerous if available at all, in the post-apocalypse.

On the other hand, my clotting disorder is fairly common probably precisely because young women are unlikely to get clots (I am an outlier), and it probably confers a slight advantage from an evolutionary perspective–I’m more prone to blood clots because my blood, in general, is slightly thicker and faster clotting than your average person’s, but this also means that I am less likely to bleed to death from traumatic injury. My genes certainly don’t care if I get a fatal blood clot on my fifth or sixth pregnancy in my mid to late thirties, but if I ignore reproductive survival in favor of the more personal, hey–less likely to bleed to death.

Furthermore, I have some training and experience in fencing. I am not very good by the standards of people who have fenced for any length of time, but we can assume that I’d be better than most members of the drastically reduced post-apocalypse population. I am generally fit–while my low body fat might leave me at a disadvantage in starvation conditions, I am willing to try my hand at beating the shit out of the less fit for their share of the food.*** While not a runner, I have stamina. I could cover long distances, especially with, say, a post-apocalyptic mountain bike.

And finally my hair, even–or perhaps especially–reverted to its natural state, is FEARSOME.

Of course, it’s not like fearsome hair is unwitchy. So it’s hard to decide. Isolated cat-keeping sorceress or bicycle-mounted Amazon? I would hope that as the latter I would attract a few groupies (of the non-pregnancy risk variety), but on the other hand, just because it’s the post-apocalypse doesn’t mean I have to be a NOMAD. I have nesting tendencies.

So where are YOU in the post-apocalypse?

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*Some people might describe this in more pejorative terms, believing it to be unhealthy. Some people think that light sockets are leaking poisonous electricity. I’m just saying. So far it doesn’t seem to be inhibiting my ability to function.

***I would, however, try to avoid cannibalism. You will just get diseased and weaken and die anyway. But if you MUST eat the flesh of other humans, for godsakes, cook it THOROUGHLY.

There’s something about being Far From Home that seems to drive me to book sales. I mean, it isn’t as if the Madison library doesn’t have “Friends of the Library” sales, although I think they’re rather fewer and far between than the monthly ones put on by the Palo Alto Public Library… and probably the selection isn’t as good. But I almost never went to them anyway.

In Tokyo, I once went to the Kinokuniya foreign language paperback sale after a full night of karaoke and a very awkward traditional Japanese breakfast at Denny’s (one of the other foreign exchange students was having personal issues), and, needless to say, no sleep whatsoever. This meant that later in the day, I had to teach two conversational English lessons also on no sleep whatsoever, but I didn’t regret it, because I’d gotten a giant bag of Y500 English fiction, which is no mean feat in Tokyo, where an English novel usually runs about Y1400 (~$12 at the time).

It was in Tokyo that I started reading Terry Pratchett, who I’d been avoiding because I erroneously believed him to be similar to Piers Anthony, and also where I read White Oleander, which I’d been avoiding because it was on Oprah’s Book Club and I am sometimes incongruously snobbish.*

Here in northern California, I think of White Oleander frequently, because the stuff is everywhere. More specifically, as I noted to my sister Hannah after she had checked the online bus schedule for me and determined that the bus I wanted back from the book sale doesn’t run on Sundays, when I see all that oleander, I think of People Whom I Would Like To Poison.

“That must be a long list,” said Hannah.

“You know,” I said. “Some people rate higher than others.”

My father always used to tell us that in Florida (where he grew up), every year a couple of people would die from building campfires with oleander brush, or, in some memorable cases, using oleander sticks to roast weenies. As a child, I was fascinated with poisonous plants. It may have started with the dire warnings I received from my mother about pokeberries, which were a lovely deep wine color and grew in our yard; I was also very interested in belladonna, an indication of my nascent goth tendencies. I thought it would be a good name for a girl.

Anyway, except for having to carry 52 books approximately a mile and a half to the nearest bus stop when it developed that the #88 (which would have taken me within THREE BLOCKS of my house) does not run on Sundays, I would say the book sale was a success. It was a bit picked over, it being the second day, but the second day is also when they let you fill up a grocery bag with books for $5 (or, the woman at the cash drawer tempted me, five bags for $20, but even if the #88 had been running this seemed a bit beyond my means). So I spent $5.50 for nine books at the regular sale, and $5 for 43 in the bargain room:

(more…)

Inside Job by Connie Willis is so short that I can’t really say anything about the story without ruining it for you. Actually, don’t scroll down on that Amazon page if you don’t want the story ruined for you, either. At least the publisher had the good sense to limit the jacket blurb to a couple of cryptic sentences.

Anyway, I will say that it’s fun near-future kind-of-fantasy, Willis’s writing is good as usual, and it made me smile and laugh. Bellwether is still my absolute favorite of her work, but give this one a try.

Yesterday I reread Bellweather by Connie Willis, a speculative fiction novel about a sociologist statistician and a biologist chaos theorist trying to determine how fads originate. I really like most of Willis’s stuff, but this might be one of my favorites. Every chapter opens with a blurb about a fad:

tattoos (1691)– Self-mutilation fad which first became popular in Europe in the 1600s when explorers brought the practice back from the South Seas. The fad recurred as an upper-class craze in the Edwardian era. Jennie Jerome, Winston Churchill’s mother, had a snake tattooed around her wrist. Tattooing became popular again in World War II, this time among servicemen and especially sailors, again in the sixties as part of the hippie movement, and yet again in the late eighties. Tattooing has the disadvantage of being a passing fad with permanent results.

It seems like the latest tattoo fad is probably on the way out, if not already out (it’s hard to gauge these things from the Midwest), but I think tattooing has also achieved a niche status–as a fad, piercing has the edge on it since piercings are a lot easier to remove/conceal/change your mind about, but there are always SOME people getting tattoos, aren’t there? It’s just that frequently it’s a marker of being “low class.” Having grown up in semi-rural Missouri, I may have an inflated idea of the prevalence of tattoos in the general population.

My father has a Grateful Dead tattoo, which he got done in the 1970s, when all his friends rolled their eyes and told him it was “a really 60s thing to do” (proving Willis’s point up there, I guess). I got my first tattoo in 2001, when it was certainly popular among college kids in northern Missouri–and it was also a Chinese character, which people frequently give me shit about, but it does actually mean what I thought it did and it doesn’t say “love” or some shit like that, so I’m not embarrassed.

It says, in fact, “morning tide.” Just a little reminder that everything changes, and new things begin–or not so new things. Winston Churchill’s mother, remember. You can’t get away from the cycles of the world.

Tattoo #3 is a two-character compound: “eldest daughter.” Tattoo #2 is Celtic knotwork and on my lower back to boot. Clearly my tattoos are not untouched by prevailing trends, but at least I didn’t pick any of them off the wall at the tattoo parlor.

couéism (1923)– Psychology fad inspired by Dr. Emile Coué, a French psychologist and the authory of Self-Mastery by Auto-Suggestion. Coué’s method of self-improvement consisted of knotting a piece of string and reciting over and over, “Every day in every way, I am getting better and better.” Died out when it became apparent no one was.

It’s the new year, and I have a couple of resolutions and a buttload of work to do. Hopefully it’s morning tide time, and not just more of the same. I don’t know. The other side of it, of course, is that the tide goes whether you like it or not.

It has been a lovely Christmas.* Pictures are still forthcoming because Dad hasn’t uploaded them yet, but I think he got some good ones this morning when we opened the presents and at the Lillys’ house for dinner and the present-opening encore.

I got lots of cool stuff, including a set of Victoria’s Secret flannel pajamas, which I had requested for myself and also purchased for both my sisters. They had 35 different patterns for those things, so of course I choked and had to call in Sophie to help me pick one for Hannah, and then I asked Sophie which pattern SHE liked, and okay, I realize it wasn’t TOTALLY smooth but apparently Sophie then immediately IMed her friend Chloe to tell her that she was getting VS pajamas for Christmas, so yeah. Subtle, I am not.

However, she never expected the first season of Ducktales on DVD. I’m pretty proud of that one. I managed not even to spill that it had been released, and she hadn’t heard elsewhere.

Back to the pajamas: I got the black ones with hot pink stars on them. They match my hair; it’s awesome. I’ve got all of our sets in the dryer right now, as they were all a little big, but they’re 100% cotton, so I imagine they’ll shrink some. It’s just hard to think of myself as a “small.”

It was a relatively light book year–only 24 total for the family, and we think our record was in the 70s. I got four, including The Partly Cloudy Patriot, a collection of essays by This American Life contributor Sarah Vowell. I got a little over halfway through it on the exercise bike this morning and I really like it a lot–definitely a recommended read.

And tomorrow, I am going to the gym in the morning with Dad, and shopping with my best friend Terri in the afternoon–I got Target and Hobby Lobby giftcards, and I want to look for a pair of jeans and a sweater or two, also. Normally, I get at LEAST one turtleneck sweater for Christmas, but I think people were too confused about my size this year. I ordered a couple of wool blends from LL Bean, but I want to see what’s out there in local retail–hopefully on super post-Christmas sale. God, I love shopping.

AND I ran into a very good friend from high school at the gym on Friday, and we’re meeting up for drinks tomorrow night–we were actually going to meet up anyway, and had exchanged numbers and everything via email, but hadn’t gotten in touch yet when he just spotted me at the gym. He said it figured that if someone showed up there with pink hair, it would be me.

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*No, we’re not Christian. My parents are now Unitarians, but my childhood was mostly devoid of any kind of religious instruction, except when I was 10 or 11 and my father took us to the Episcopal Church for awhile in an attempt to provide a kind of spiritual innoculation, so we’d be less likely to hit our midlife crises and join some snake-handling cult in the Ozarks.

As a child, I do remember a) constructing a shrine in the backyard to some pair of twin goddesses I’d invented–a kind of feminist Zoroastrianism, and b) praying TO the Christmas tree on at least one occasion. I was always into pageantry.